Argentine Tango School

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Argentine Tango dance technique 14: Boleo – Technical details and exercises with Marcelo Solis

Argentine Tango dance technique 14: Boleo – Technical details and exercises

Since our legs move like pendulums, a back and forth movement of the leg without change of weight is possible. We call this “boleo”. This pendular movement of the free of weight leg is more often combined with the spiral movement of the leg described above in relation to pivoting.

  • Keeping your free of weight foot inside edge in contact with the floor, pivot back and forth, letting your free of weight leg to pendulum, carefully keeping the details described above about knees and legs.
  • Make forward and backward ocho moves and practice the back and forth pendulum at each instance of pivoting.
 
Argentine Tango dance technique 13: Boleo with Marcelo Solis

Argentine Tango dance technique 13: Boleo

Argentine Tango Technique 12: Backward ocho. With Marcelo Solis.

Argentine Tango dance technique 12: Continuing backward ocho

Continue pivoting the same direction of your established rotation and move your free of weight foot backward, aligned with your lower sagittal plane, your torso torquing according to counter body movement, orienting the center of your chest to the central axis of the couple (backward ocho).

 
José Gonzalez Castillo Argentine Tango lyricist portrait at the piano

“Sobre el pucho” by Juan D’Arienzo y su Orquesta Típica with Héctor Mauré in vocals, 1941.

“Sobre el pucho” by Juan D’Arienzo y su Orquesta Típica with Héctor Mauré in vocals, 1941.

José Gonzalez Castillo, author of tangos

José González Castillo

Poet and lyricist (25 January 1885 – 22 October 1937)

Lyrics for tango were born around 1914, based on those ones conceived by Pascual Contursi that year and the following years (“De vuelta al bulín”, “Ivette”, “Flor de fango”, “Mi noche triste (Lita)”), and they were growing strong very slowly.

So much so that in Carlos Gardel’s repertoire tangos were, until the next decade, a rare bird. There was not even a notion of how to sing a tango, a standard that Gardel was gradually establishing after 1922.

That was, precisely, the year José González Castillo truly disembarked in the genre with the lyrics of “Sobre el pucho”, after Sebastián Piana’s music, which was introduced at the talent contest organized by Tango cigarettes.

José Gobello (Crónica general del tango, Editorial Fraterna) stated about this work that, with it «some novelties broke into tango that the tango literary work of Homero Manzi would later turn into true constants. By the way, Pompeya («Un callejón en Pompeya/y un farolito plateando el fango…»); later, the description of the neighborhood and, soon, the enumeration as a descriptive procedure».

But in those lyrics there is something else, metaphor, that springs up in the memory that the malevo devotes to his lost love «…tu inconstancia loca/me arrebató de tu boca/como pucho que se tira/ cuando ya/ni sabor ni aroma da». It is clear that González Castillo was a forerunner, and also that other later lyricists were who deepened those trends.

Read more about José González Castillo at www.todotango.com

Listen and buy:

  • Amazon music

  • iTunes music

  • Spotify

We are happy to have a collaboration with the people from tangotunes.com from whom some of you may have heard, they do high-quality transfers from original tango shellacs.

It is the number 1 source for professional Tango DJs all over the world.

  • Now they started a new project that addresses the dancers and the website is https://en.mytango.online
    You will find two compilations at the beginning, one tango and one vals compilation in amazing quality.
    The price is 50€ each (for 32 songs each compilation) and now the good news!

If you enter the promo code 8343 when you register at this site you will get a 20% discount!

Thanks for supporting this project, you will find other useful information on the site, a great initiative.

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We have lots more music and history

Learn to dance Argentine Tango

Dance Argentine Tango with Marcelo Solis at Escuela de Tango de Buenos Aires

Walking, dancing, body and words

Dance Argentine Tango with Marcelo Solis at Escuela de Tango de Buenos AiresHumans are the only known beings that walk upright. Our walk is as characteristic as our rational mind. They are related.

You can know about other people by looking at the way they walk. You can know yourself better if you can see yourself and see the way you walk. Others can know about you by paying attention at the way you walk.

You can improve yourself by improving the way you walk.

How is the life of an average American affected by the lack of walking that is becoming more and more a characteristic of the “American way of life”?

This is a very “American” problem, because the rest of the world walks, and a lot.

Tango has made an art of walking in company, with your partner, on the dance floor full of other couples.

Where else in real life would you walk as proud, happy, honestly and powerful, besides the dance floor of a true milonga?

Body and words:

How to talk about something without knowing it? Do we really know our body? Perhaps the ignorance of our body produces the ignorance of the materiality of the world in general, of its reality.

Learning to dance is as important as learning to talk.

Is it possible to learn to speak without the participation of another human being in the process? Would it be possible one day in the future for a baby to learn how to talk from machines?

Speech is transmitted only with the participation of our body, and when our body teaches others how to talk, we dance.

Language is an aspect of dance. A word that is not danced – that does not have the support of a body – is destructive, evil, anguishing, a dead end, conducive to perish, not alive.

True dancers do not talk too much.

Resources:

https://www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/tourist/feet.pdf

https://youtu.be/1l_4OW_Ir7M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVPLIuBy9CY

https://on.ted.com/babybrain

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